SetTerminationProtection locks a cluster (job flow) so the EC2 instances in the cluster cannot be terminated by user intervention, an API call, or in the event of a job-flow error. The cluster still terminates upon successful completion of the job flow. Calling SetTerminationProtection on a cluster is similar to calling the Amazon EC2 DisableAPITermination API on all EC2 instances in a cluster.

SetTerminationProtection is used to prevent accidental termination of a cluster and to ensure that in the event of an error, the instances persist so that you can recover any data stored in their ephemeral instance storage.

To terminate a cluster that has been locked by setting SetTerminationProtection to true, you must first unlock the job flow by a subsequent call to SetTerminationProtection in which you set the value to false.

For more information, seeManaging Cluster Termination in the Amazon EMR Management Guide.